After delivering and releasing hundreds of mobile applications and games under FileArchiveHaven, we’ve decided to separate future game development from the FileArchiveHaven brand to allow it to focus on its roots (file systems, archiving, and security).  We feel this step also enables us to build a new, bigger, more focused game company.

For months now we’ve been quietly working behind the scenes to create the framework of a new cutting-edge company with a heavy focus on virtual reality.  I can’t believe its only been a few days since we reached out to people and began collecting information – but we’re now ready to share our process and the results from our survey. Thank you to all our supporters who took the time to complete it!

A New Company

Picking The Name

Throughout our research and brainstorming phases, we felt we had a good idea of what type of name works for a game company. It helps that we are gamers that love experimenting with new technology.

So we started with the name– and yes, we started BIG! A big list, which we whittled down from 550+ potential company names to 12 before asking other developers, key gamers, good friends and even family to help us pick the final name of our new game company.

As you’ve probably guessed, Red Iron Labs was picked by the most votes!  We were extra fortunate because we had used Red Iron Labs in the past for other projects, but was currently sitting idle. So we couldn’t be happier about the name choice!  This meant we had some resources already on standby that helped jump us forward.

It was immensely rewarding to see the survey results, and to find that others share our vision for the company.

Logo Design

As great as a Company Name is, it needs a cool logo to go with it!

In another universe, a long, long time ago …We worked with a roaming artist and long-time friend, Tius Tutty, who created a great logo (image on the left) for a small initiative for us called Red Iron Labs.  At the time the brand was meant to be used for experimental projects…  and over the last few years the logo has had some colour and text added before becoming the big white R we see flying as the icon on this site (image on the right).

Having a strong brand in a competitive game market is important, and it’s hard to ignore a giant red icon!  It also fits very nicely with our futuristic-horror-esque game company we envision.

Web Design

With a company name selected, and a logo ready to go, the pressure was on to create a website.  As you can imagine, we’ve spent a good amount of effort trying to build and polish a website with the right feel for what we are going for.

It’s going to go through some iterations, but seems relatively stable, and scales well on mobile.

Survey Results

Names Compared

Here are the name results from the survey.  One of the items not represented in the graph, but noticeable in the numbers, was that Red Iron Labs had the most “5 – LOVE it” votes (and the least amount of “1 – Bad” votes).  This makes us feel confident that the majority of people who voted will be comfortable with the selection.

Personally, I was also rooting for Catalyst, Ethereal and Octopi.  “Red Iron” has a strong presence, and to quote my close friend Andrey:

Red Iron sounds like some sort of Soviet submarine […] I like it

There is something unique and dynamic, something that just feels right about the name and it represents great potential for our future plans.

Virtual Reality

What was interesting from the Virtual Reality numbers, is about 2/3rds of the voters were interested in Virtual Reality.  But didn’t know much about the brands or different headsets (hint, OSVR developer kits are available at 299USD and Oculus Rift recently started taking pre-orders for their consumer release at 599USD).

This reinforces that we need to create a good VR layer that makes it easy to use with many VR solutions – and that we need to have a good and clear way to explain what technology will work with our games (and how).

Game Pricing and Input

Pricing can be very subjective.  We found most PC/Console based users were comfortable in the 10->20 dollar region, whereas mobile-focused users were typically in the 1->5 dollar region.

The input devices question underlines the understanding that we need to not only handle multiple VR headsets, but multiple input controllers as well.  This is something we expected to see in the numbers– although personally, I thought more people would have played with a Leap Motion or Myo!

Games and Features

These two panels seemed fairly consistent with each other in the images.  However, we found there to be some additional nuggets of information when we “read between the numbers”.

• Action-based game was the only game type to have no “bad” votes.
• The bottom 4 features in the list below had very consistent 3-level ratings, showing that it was equally important to everyone.
• The top 5 features tended to vary a lot more from person to person, with stronger opinions of what was important.

Growth and Future Plans

The company is growing fast behind the scenes.  We’ve started reaching out to see what our options are, we are going to need tremendous help over the next year.  We have huge aspirations, and our first major focus is to start working towards funding.

As for the games and what we have in store?  Those shall remain a secret for another day.

A big thank you to everyone for the help!